Vice President Kamala Harris has officially entered the 2024 presidential election. The majority of Democratic delegates have endorsed her, as has President Joe Biden. She also received over $100 million in donations in her first 24 hours as a candidate. But perhaps most surprisingly, she has become an internet phenomenon thanks to a torrent of weird memes, surreal fancams, and endless remixes of her signature laugh.
Harris' new status as a genuine—not ironic—TikTok icon is particularly unexpected, considering how just four years ago she was defined on the internet as, at best, a curiosity thanks to her small but vocal KHive fandom, and, at worst, a lesser villain to chronically online leftists who dubbed her “Kamala the cop.” As Maya Luna, the executive director of Progress Libs, a Gen Z-focused political action committee, wrote this week in a tweet linking to a particularly unhinged Harris video edit, “KHive went from being exclusively 45-year-old suburban moms to 20-year-old gay posters who make shit like this overnight lmfao.”
The story of how that happened reveals a fascinating shift in the way Americans use the internet now—a shift that Democratic strategists seemed wholly unprepared for even just a week ago. Here's how the KHive went from internet oddity to online obsession.
U.S. presidential elections tend to crystallize new eras of internet history. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign gave the world the instantly iconic “Hope” poster, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, which inspired a million Reddit photoshops. His 2012 debates against Sen. Mitt Romney were effectively simulcast via Tumblr GIFs and Twitter memes, which were, in turn, aggregated into endless Facebook listicles. And, of course, in 2016, former president Donald Trump introduced the world to a new, extremely viral form of far-right populism that would spread across the planet in the later half of the decade.
Ever since Trump's first campaign, it has been liberals, leftists, and progressives who have found themselves on the wrong foot when it comes to using social platforms. In 2016, Hillary Clinton famously misunderstood how fast and reactive digital media had become and continually produced viral gaffes that Trump easily weaponized against her—most famously her “basket of deplorables” line, which became a term of endearment among right-wing voters.
It wasn't until the 2018 midterms that Democrats began to understand that social media was, at least at the time, fueled by subcultures and communities. The 2010s internet wasn’t only the domain of Trump's far-right 4chan trolls and gamergaters but also that of stan armies. Every major pop star had a Swifties equivalent that would wage cyber warfare on their favorite artist's behalf. And this was also true for activism. In 2018, a blue wave coalition of progressives, liberals, and leftists helped achieve “the fourth-best performance for Democrats in the 37 general House elections since President Donald Trump was born,” as CNN reported at the time. And this was largely thanks to both digital savvy civil rights groups like Black Lives Matter and a very online leftist movement using Trumpian Twitter tactics that would eventually be dubbed the “dirtbag left.”
By the time Kamala Harris, then a California senator, entered the 2020 primary, the general understanding was that to win a U.S. presidential election, Democratic candidates had to not only emulate Obama (the last Democrat to really blow up online) but also troll like Trump—while simultaneously trying to build some kind of fandom. As a result, a lot of candidates swerved between seeming out of touch and outright cringe.
This is why, in 2020, Pete Buttigieg leaned so heavily into both his folksy “Mayor Pete” nickname and kept encouraging his supporters to dance to Panic! at The Disco's “High Hopes.” Meanwhile, Harris's KHive was devolving into drama.
The KHive—the name is a play on Beyoncé's Beyhive—was, in fact, an organic internet movement, largely built by Black women. According to a 2019 report in Vox, this small group was generating hundreds of millions of impressions on Twitter. But it was also becoming—as most fandoms do—toxic. The KHive battled the dirtbag left and also fought internally, sinking their chances to connect with the wider internet. Some argued that Harris failed to spread her message beyond her supersupporters, and that this contributed to her loss in 2020. “After dabbling in calling for social and economic justice, she turned back to presenting herself as a prosecutor who would use her skills to indict a ‘criminal’ president,” Slate’s Julia Craven wrote in December 2019. “The inconsistency ultimately led the campaign to a slow death.”
Curiously, Biden's now-defunct reelection campaign spent the summer in a similar state of confusion. Its tactics were not only inconsistent, they were downright contradictory—most notably in how Biden used TikTok. His team launched @bidenhq in February only to sign a bill two months later that would ban the app if its Chinese owner ByteDance doesn't divest the platform. And yes, users did notice.
The account rebranded itself as @kamalahq on Monday, however, and posted a photo gallery set to audio from a Chappell Roan song that has now been viewed 16 million times. And beyond her own account, Harris is dominating American TikTok feeds right now, largely thanks to her quick embrace of the “Brat summer” meme.
In the same way that communities and subcultures powered online discourse in the late 2010s, video content and filter bubbles reign supreme now. Users identify with fandoms, but they do so from inside their algorithmic ecosystems. It's much harder for celebrities and candidates to break through to a wide audience, especially as television is eclipsed by short-form video. Which makes Harris’s use of pop music an important factor here. A lot has changed since the days of Mayor Pete’s “High Hopes” dance. TikTok is now the most important social platform in America, and it primarily runs on audio. Meanwhile, Instagram—arguably TikTok’s biggest competitor—is currently filtering political content. A memeable candidate is therefore even more useful for breaking through voters’ algorithmic bubbles.
Harris’s huge first week doesn't mean that Democratic strategists have completely acclimated to the current moment, though. Thankfully, Democrats do not appear to be interested in taking Aaron Sorkin’s deranged advice to nominate Mitt Romney, but they are pushing some pretty terrible campaigning ideas. Semafor got hold of a memo written by Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks and venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith that, well, reads exactly like something a law professor and venture capitalist would dream up. It suggests working with a disparate cast of celebrities such as MrBeast, Oprah Winfrey, and the rapper Common. If Harris wants to win in November, she should stay as far away from this sort of early-2010s liberal posturing as possible. Reports are already circulating that the Democratic National Convention will feature “an A-list pop star.” If Harris wants to hold on to her cool factor, hopefully it’s someone who was born after 1985.
A common refrain from leftist activists right now is that the groundswell of support for Harris—particularly from the dirtbag leftists who have, at least temporarily, given up on “Kamala the cop”—could translate into the kind of result France saw in its snap election last month, when a new left-wing coalition trounced the far-right faction that they had united against. At least right now, that does seem right. But we still have—as far as elections go—a long time until November.
We’re also no closer now than we were in 2016 to really knowing if online engagement directly results in a good turnout at the polls. But before the internet, the accepted wisdom was that good, consistent campaigning and a strong drumbeat of media coverage helped candidates. And it seems reasonable to argue that TikTok buzz, as amorphous and fickle as it is, is a form of earned media coverage. If coconut memes and laugh remixes are the secret to holding that coalition together, so be it. Let a thousand fancams flourish.
But Harris and her team would be best not to forget a piece of very old internet advice: You can’t force a meme.